Monday, January 18, 2010
MLK Day
Amen.
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I saw this at the top of Summit to Shore's blogroll, on Presbyterian Bloggers, and I just watched it & thought I would post it too.
I've read the text but I don't know if I've ever watched the whole speech, beginning to end. Gave me shivers. And beyond the speech itself, what an amazing gathering of courage & dignity there was on the Mall that day.
I don't know that I'd say our country has quite reached "the solid rock of brotherhood." But how much less progress would we have made along "the sunlit path of racial justice" without Dr. King & the people who were brave enough to follow him?
Thanks to all of them & especially Dr. King. Would he were still with us today.
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3 comments:
Since I don't have a high-speed connection over which to confirm the exact words, I apologize if I don't get this exactly right, but the part of the speech I like best is that bit about judging a person "not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character."
Today, alas, there is far too little attention paid to the content of someone's character.
I believe you have that almost word for word, and I completely agree with you.
I think that the great accomplishment of the civil rights movement was that the stamp of official approval was removed from overt racism. I was listening to Dr. King talk about tired travelers being unable to check into motels & hotels, and that sort of thing is thankfully a thing of the past (although I'm not forgetting that there is still this entire group of people who are excluded from the legal benefits of marriage because of personal traits which I don't believe to be a matter of choice).
Changing the basic human tendency to make snap judgements about a person's worth based on their outward appearance - that's a harder project, isn't it?
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